This is the fifth installment in a 10 part blog on Microsoft as a practitioner of asymmetric marketing.
5. Market Freezing
Equally important to asymmetric marketers is the concept of market freezing. Think of market ‘freezing’ as keeping an emerging market in a state of arrested development (a non-adoption driven ‘pseudo-chasm’) until you are ready to capitalize on it’s emergence. It’s kind of like barrier management, only it’s a lock-out of other players from a small, even non-existent, but ‘destined-to-be-big’ market. Let’s examine the so-called ‘trusted computing’ movement as a good example of how Microsoft has ‘frozen’ much of the action in this emerging market until it’s release of it’s next generation ‘Longhorn’ Windows OS in 2006.
Trusted computing is a set of ideas that roll up into the simple proposition that enterprise IT administrators and network operators need to know what devices are attached to their networks. In other words, user authentication directories become augmented with device authentication directories that more effectively eliminate identity theft and hostile access to the network, from both outsiders and insiders. In order for the trusted computing vision to become a reality, hardware and software providers are collaborating to build open standards that any vendor can incorporate into their products.
While an industry organization has been formed to manage the trusted computing initiative, very little has actually been accomplished, with the exception that some notebook PCs from IBM and others now contain ‘embedded security subsystems’ built using chips that conform to the standard.
While Microsoft is a founding member of this group, it has also popularized a competing vision it calls the NGSCB (next generation secure computing base) and previously referred to as Palladium. It’s ‘competing’ because it has set for itself a wide range of applications beyond device authentication, including DRM, a capability both Hollywood and the music industry really need to fight off the file-sharing crowd and develop real online business models, e.g. superdistribution. NGSCB/Palladium is not scheduled for delivery into the market for another few years but the DRM space is very active now. Since Palladium/NGSCB is described as an offering that will support DRM by allowing DRM to run in a ‘trusted environment on trustworthy machines’, the implication is that no ‘real’ DRM solutions exist because they are not running on ‘trustworthy’ machines. By this logic the entire installed base of PCs worldwide are untrustworthy machines. Microsoft has recently opened the door to a course correction on NGSCB, under pressure from software developers tired of waiting.
This is an example of very clever market freezing on the part of Microsoft. It will allow Microsoft at least 2 more years for the DRM market to evolve while it develops it’s NGSCB solution. So far, none of Microsoft’s competitors have effectively dealt with this strategy and offered a different vision on how really enable DRM on legacy PCs and are in fact lining up behind the Microsoft message. A smart startup or emerging player would counter this market freezing initiative with a loud, brass-knuckles announcement of a ‘virtual NGSCB’ solution that would get you part of the way there today.
I say this because you literally have the media industry issuing hundreds of John Doe warrants for music downloaders, instead of working with tech companies to solve the problem so any announcement would be welcome. I call this ‘overhang’ communications. In other words, what Microsoft has done is to aggressively communicate a ‘vaporware’ or stealth roadmap to the marketplace.
Every company (and their agency of record) who is engaged in a market that Microsoft may annex or freeze should become adept at overhang communications.
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